Mobile payment is an emerging technology that seeks to replace cash and conventional credit cards with mobile technology. Most mobile payment systems, however, rely on similar features. Android devices implement various mobile payment mechanisms, such as Android Pay, Samsung Pay, and Chase Pay, and iPhones implement Apple Pay. Android Pay and Apple Pay both rely on the near field communication (NFC) standard to communicate with payment terminals. However, this requires retailers to upgrade their hardware to accept contactless payments.
To make mobile payments backwardly compatible with conventional magnetic swipe terminals, Samsung introduced magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology, called Samsung Pay, to complement the NFC technology in Samsung smartphones. Samsung Pay technology supports magnetic secure transmission (MST) as well as NFC transmissions. This means a mobile device with Samsung Pay works with any payment terminal that accepts contactless payments with NFC or the more traditional method of swiping a payment card through the magnetic stripe reader. Samsung Pay uses a circuit in the mobile device that transmits an electro-magnetic signal that simulates the swiping of a physical payment card in the magnetic stripe reader. Thus, when a Samsung device is placed close to a conventional payment card terminal and Samsung Pay is activated, the magnetic stripe reader on the terminal communicates with the mobile device via electro-magnetic signals and payment data is received as if a physical payment card had been swiped.
However, magnetic secure transmission (MST)-based technology has not been fully exploited beyond the simple payment operations. There is a need for applications of MST-based technology that enable the operator of the magnetic card swipe reader (i.e., the merchant) to provide real-time feedback to the manufacturer of the MST-enabled device or to the payment processing company (i.e., acquirer).